• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Jeannette Nelson is Head of Voice at the National Theatre. She has worked extensively as a voice coach in theatre, film and television. Jeannette worked at the National Theatre from 1992 to 2001, at Shakespeare’s Globe for the 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2001 seasons, with the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2001 to 2005, with Sydney Theatre Company in 2006, and at the National, as Head of Voice, from 2007. Other voice and dialect coaching in London and the UK includes work with the Royal Court, Young Vic, Donmar Warehouse, Shared Experience, Out of Joint, Complicite, Sheffield Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, Birmingham Rep, Nottingham Playhouse, Liverpool Everyman, English Touring Theatre, Oxford Stage Company and the West End. Jeannette was in charge of the company voice work for the recent National Theatre production of Euripides’ Medea. The production starred Helen McCrory in the role of Medea, was directed by Carrie Cracknell, and used a version of the play specially written by Ben Power, Associate Director at the National Theatre. In this interview with Chrissy Combes at the National Theatre on 14 August, 2014, Jeannette speaks about the role of a voice department in a theatre, and about her work with the actors on the production of Medea. An illustrated version of this interview is available on the Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Studies website: http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/pvcrs/2014/nelson CC. I’m talking today to Jeannette Nelson, who is Head of Voice at the National Theatre. Jeannette is going to talk to us about the production of Euripides’ Medea which is currently in performance at the National Theatre. This is the first time that a production of Medea has been staged at the National Theatre. The production is directed by Carrie Cracknell and uses a new version of the play, written by Ben Power, who is an Associate Director here. Jeannette, I wonder if I could begin by asking you to tell us a little bit about how you developed your interest in voice? JN. Well, I was a singer and a dancer. I did that for about ten years and I got a little bored, and I decided when I was 28 to go and do an English degree at university which my school had wanted me to do in the first place (but I went to ballet school instead). My Shakespeare professors at university had been producing student productions of Shakespeare for local schools for many years, to quite a high standard. I played a part in one of their productions, in King Lear. And they asked me whether I would be interested in helping them set up a professional company to pursue these student productions, and I did, and I think then I realised that I was probably going to stay in theatre in some way. And as part of the work I did with the student actors, I did some warm ups around what I knew from singing and so forth. And I began to realise that I was quite interested in that and that people liked what I was doing. And I wondered whether I could continue performing but teach a bit as well. But I wasn’t sure whether anybody trains you to be a voice teacher. And I happened to be driving past the Central School of Speech and Drama one day and I thought I’d stop and see if they had a course. I went in, they gave me the prospectus, and on the very last page there was a small paragraph with details of an Advanced Diploma in Voice Studies. I applied for that, was accepted, and studied on the course. It was probably the best year of my life. It brought together everything I had done before – movement, singing, literature – and I just had a ball, with wonderful people on the course. It was a very small course in those days. It’s now a very big international course. And the external examiner that year happened to be Patsy Rodenberg, who, as you probably know, is my predecessor here at the National Theatre. She gave me a career, really. She invited me to join her at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama as a teacher, part-time. And a couple of years later, she was appointed here at the National Theatre and she asked me to come and to be her assistant. So I spent ten years assisting her here on a part-time basis, and doing lots and lots of other work and freelance. And then I left and went to the Royal Shakespeare Company for four years and then I went to Sydney Theatre Company for a year, and while I was in Sydney, Patsy decided to move on and I applied for the job as Head of Voice. I came back for Christmas, Nick Hytner kindly met me during my Christmas holiday and offered me the job, and I didn’t go back to Sydney. That’s a potted version! CC. Thank you. And how would you define the role of a vocal coach, or the voice department in a theatre? What do they actually do within the production team? JN. Ok. That’s a good question. My brief, very clearly, from Nick Hytner, is clarity and audibility. That’s absolutely the base line. It has to be heard clearly in our quite challenging big theatres. How I do that is up to me. And I probably think my job is divided into three, really. Myself and my two part- time colleagues are responsible for the vocal health, really, of the actors. We keep them in shape, almost like athletics coaches. You know, the majority of them are trained actors, we keep them in shape. Some of them may have been working in television for a while, need to get their theatre muscles back. There are younger actors coming in for the first time, or getting bigger parts. So we work with them individually during their rehearsal process. It’s all production based. I sometimes do group work, which I certainly did on Medea, a lot of group work, and we do a lot of warm-ups for productions, making sure actually that the actors know how to warm themselves up, and we lead warm- ups. We also all teach dialect, so for the needs of different dialects, we do that. But, when you come to working on a play, you can’t separate the practical voice work from the voice and language, so we are particularly interested in the department in rhetoric, not just in classical plays, but we will work with actors on the rhetoric of any play. And it’s quite interesting, actually, because actors don’t often recognise the heightened qualities of language when the play is modern, and that can be very interesting for them to discover that a bit. But, of course, that particularly applies to classical drama. CC. Might I ask you something about Tom Scutt’s set design for Medea? It is a very interesting split-level set with the high balcony and the glass windows behind which the musicians play, and the wedding reception for Jason and his new bride can be seen to be taking place. Many theatre critics have commented on the clear cinematic influences, the clever references to the horror film in that high balcony, the dilapidated room downstairs, and the spooky and mysterious upstage garden with the swings. There were a lot of different levels for actors to speak from and it’s such a massive stage. Was any of the dialogue spoken from upstage, in the garden area? JN. Some lines were spoken from the forest, as it were. CC. It was called the forest? JN. Yes, people coming through. But quite forward, not particularly back. It was only Medea at the beginning, at the back. CC. And different members of the chorus, actually playing the bridesmaids at the wedding, spoke from different areas? JN. Yes. CC. Could we speak about the beginning, and the Nurse. The Nurse. I found the Nurse very interesting. Because Euripides has his prologue, the idea that somebody comes on and gives the exposition and the background...But she went beyond that in this production. In performance (and in Ben Powers’ text) the Nurse actually starts by saying ‘Listen!’ to the audience, and so she is emphasising the direct address. Did you work with the actor on that? It must have been hard. JN. Yes, I worked with her very closely, actually, on both her big speeches, yes, I need to remember what I did. Yes, well, you’re working in a Greek amphitheatre. There is no fourth wall on the edge of the stage. The fourth wall is at the back. So, it was helpful to her to absolutely anchor the audience in with that. And, very much, we talked about storytelling techniques through that, that there is introduction, exploration, conclusion, not just one, over the whole speech, but continually, using those elements, trying to get into the ear of the listeners in that way. Beginnings of plays are always tricky anyway. You can’t go too fast, you know. Our ear has to adjust. And also Carrie was very, very keen that this was ultra natural, absolutely natural, for all of them, actually, all of the speaking. So nothing seemingly heightened or elaborated. And I enjoyed that too. That we actually used what is there in the structure that Ben has written for us, which is clearly rhetorical, but in as real a way as possible, because I do think we speak like that, actually, constantly.

Load more

  10

Copy Link